"Well we don't have a lot of rituals in this society really. Well we
have some rituals in this society; we have football games, we have the
Super Bowl. But when the Super Bowl is over ,when a football game is
over, you've had your thrill but suddenly you begin to realize that
it was inherently meaningless. There was no transcendence..." --Ritual, Community and Burning Man, An Interview with Larry Harvey,
Burning Man's Founder /@Deolog!

"We lead lives that are deadeningly passive. Everyone
is sorted out in a seperate stall, like cattle in a feed-lot. Every
time anything like real culture is produced by a creative community
it's expropriated and flogged in the media and turned into a cliche
- it used to be six years, now it's six months it's getting down to
six weeks." --Larry Harvey

Our community will have a defining
perimeter.
We moving from the illimitable space
of the
Black Rock Desert to terra firma. This
place
has the permanency of real land. Until
now
we have floated in nothing. --Burning Man '97: Promised Land

"Nothing's going to trickle down anymore, so there's no point in
sitting around waiting for a grant," he says. "Populism is in the air.
There are amazing reserves of raw talent out there. Wonderful things have
been achieved at Burning Man by people who have never done art before.
Instead of doing art about the state of society, we do art that creates
society around it." --from Got A Light? SF Bay Guardian, 8-28-96

"It was started by a guy named
Larry
Harvey," I explained to the camping
store salesman, whom I hoped could
guide
me to the spot. "He was getting
over
a love affair, so he and a friend built
an
eight-foot man, took it out to Baker
Beach
in San Francisco, and burned it. It
took
off from there." ... Ten years
later,
the Burning Man is a four-story wooden
figure
in the desert a hundred miles north
of Reno.
The premise: light it with neon, pack
it
with pyrotechnics, party around it
for three
days, and then torch it. --from Call of the Wild - A Year of Living
Riotously - Discovery Channel [1995]

Burning Man, when we met, was an arty attraction of San
Francisco's creative underground; Larry and his friend Jerry James had
begun, four years before, constructing a human figure from scrap wood,
taking it to Baker Beach on the summer solstice, and burning it against
the ocean sunset. The first Burning Man captivated an audience of unexpecting
passers-by, and so a second, larger Man was burned the next summer solstice
for the delight of friends. --from The Burning
Man Responds to the Proust Questionnaire

" ... an archaeopteryx on my shoulder did whisper me a lulu, videlicet:
Larry Harvey, the Artist in Charge of The Whole Thing at the
selfsame Burning Man Thingamajig is now negotiating with one of the
larger casinos in nearby Reno, working on the Deal of the Century. Sources
close to the First Church of the Last Laugh blabbed to this very
col. that Harvey will sell the entire Burning Man concession to the
casino. The adjacent town of Gerlach will be made over into a
modern parking facility. From thence, air-conditioned trams will carry
festivalgoers onto the playa at scheduled intervals. At the re-named
Larry Harvey's Burning Man Land & Casino, attendees can gamble,
visit theme "lands" such as Mudland & Swimsuitland, & watch
the Man burn, every hour on the hour. Rumormill hazzit that the Disney
people are just a bit worried. . . --from The Earth is My Beat, September 1, 1995 Burning Man Late
Edtion

HARVEY: I grew up in the outskirts of Portland,
Oregon, in a truck farming region that was amid truck farms and pastures,
at the end of a road, in an area that was populated by this diaspora of
immigrants. Japanese, Germans, Italians. And the Harvey's there, squatting
in the midst of it.

My father was a carpenter and mason. A relentlessly self-made man.
Semi-literate, and so fierce in his autonomy, so insistent on his
integrity as someone self-made, that not through a mean heart, but perhaps
because of a blind one, he neglected to make contact with those around
him.

So, our family in many way was nestled in the midst of strangers. I
turned at an early age to the communion of nature, which was wonderfully,
mystically present to me from an early age. We were on the flood plain of
the Columbia river, sitting on top of 30 feet of loam. We had an acre and
half. We had chickens, we raised every vegetable known to man.

I was an adopted child, as was my brother. Both my brother and I had
reasons to feel isolated, doubly so because in our family there wasn't a
great deal of direct emotional communication. Finally, the world receded
in my childhood to what I could securely keep behind my closed door.

My father, avatar of integrity that he was, respected that, which was
a wise thing. It was a kind of love. But I, for years, felt as if I
didn't know why anyone did anything. In a way it's good. Throughout
my life I've always felt that I was making some new landfall on the
shores of humanity, having started out from such radical isolation.
... from page 4 of techweb interview

I wanted to ask Larry Harvey if success was killing his original idea for Burning
Man. So I did - Commonwealth
Club ads ... Tom Ridge and The Commonwealth Club at indybay.org

Now, apparently, even the Commonwealth Club thinks it must grasp clumsily after
slow minds in the youth demographic, and you can see the results in an unctuous
ad campaign running at a transit stop near you. In the campaign, supposedly
hip and attractive men and women of the 18-to-34 set assert their intense desire
for close interaction with semicelebrities at the Commonwealth Club. All of
the ads radiate condescension; one particular ad, located at the bottom of an
escalator serving the southeast corner of the Powell Street BART/Muni station,
is cloying enough to have inspired sarcasm of a type that can only be called
... inspired.